The Attorney General (AG) and Minister of Justice, Dr. Dominic Ayine, has defended the bail conditions imposed by investigative bodies on former government appointees being probed for alleged corruption.
Dr. Ayine explained that the conditions are not excessive but are necessary safeguards to ensure suspects remain available to stand trial.
He made the clarification while responding to questions from Members of Parliament on the floor of Parliament on Tuesday.
“The Economic and Organized Crime Office and other law enforcement agencies under my ministry are not acting arbitrarily. Bail depends on the crime, the gravity of the crime. And so what we are seeing now is that the sums involved in the criminal investigations are very huge.
“And because they are very huge, if you set very low bail conditions in terms of the sums, the likelihood is that when the person, the suspect escapes or is unavailable to stand trial, whatever you are able to extract in justification will not be able to upset the sum that is involved, the criminal liability that is involved,” he said.
He cited examples where individuals are accused of causing financial loss to the state running into billions of cedis or stealing millions in public funds. In such cases, he argued, the bail sum must correspond to the magnitude of the alleged offense.
“So, for instance, if you have a situation where the suspect is accused of, let’s say, causing financial loss to the state in the sum of one billion Ghana cedis or stealing in the sum of 31.1 million Ghana cedis, you cannot set bail terms that are unjustifiably low,” he said.
“So it is the magnitude of the offenses we are dealing with that dictates that we set bail sums that reasonably justify the crimes that have been committed.”
The Attorney General insisted that the approach is both fair and legally sound.
“Mr. Speaker, there is nothing unjust or unfair with respect to what is happening. I am standing on firm ground in saying this, because the sums of money and the criminal enterprise that are the subject matter of the bail conditions that are being imposed have never before been seen in this, our country.
And that is the reason why it is important that we take stringent steps to continue to do what we are doing.”
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